Two US tech companies secure their own power capacities for their data centers this week: Nvidia is investing in a utility in Texas, while Amazon is building its own gas power plant there. The chip company is paying two billion dollars for about 20 percent, with an option for another billion. According to the permit, Amazon’s facility in Pecos County is expected to be one of the largest sources of carbon dioxide in the USA.
Nvidia secures stake in Lancium
According to The Information, Nvidia is initially investing two billion dollars in the Blackstone-backed utility Lancium and receives a stake of about 20 percent in return. An additional billion dollars is contingent on meeting certain grid connection milestones. The deal values Lancium at around ten billion dollars in total.
Lancium operates the first active site of the Stargate project: the approximately 400-acre “Lancium Clean Campus” in Abilene, Texas. Stargate is a joint project by SoftBank, OpenAI, and Oracle, which US President Donald Trump introduced in January 2026 with an investment framework of up to 500 billion dollars for AI infrastructure. Lancium has already secured around four gigawatts of power capacity in Texas and is developing sites for up to 15 additional gigawatts. The fresh capital is intended to finance the expansion, while the company is reportedly considering an IPO for 2027.
Amazon plans gas power plant with record emissions
At the same time, Amazon is launching its own gas power plant called GW Ranch in Pecos County, Texas, as first reported by the research format Distilled Earth. The facility is expected to deliver up to 7.65 gigawatts of power with 35 gas turbines – equivalent to the output of several large power plant blocks. Texas has granted the power plant a permit for up to 33 million tons of CO2 per year, although this maximum value has not been independently verified, according to the New York Times.
This could mean that the power plant emits more than twice as much carbon dioxide as the James H. Miller Jr. coal plant in Alabama, one of the largest individual emitters in the USA. Satellite images from late July 2026 already show earthworks on the site; the first power delivery is scheduled for early 2027, and a connection to the Texas power grid is not planned in the initial phase. An Amazon spokesperson acknowledged to the newspaper that AI data centers could complicate the company’s climate goals, but emphasized the commitment to adhere to them.
Tech companies finance energy infrastructure directly
Both deals are part of a growing number of direct energy investments by the AI industry. Just in July, the startup Valar Atomics secured a billion dollars for small nuclear reactors, including a joint test facility with Nvidia in Utah. Anthropic, on the other hand, has secured computing power for ten billion dollars in a Norwegian data center through contractor Volta, according to Bloomberg. Amazon itself had already raised its investment forecast for AI infrastructure to 220 billion dollars in August.
The background is the increasing power demand from AI applications. Climate researcher Zeke Hausfather estimates that an intensive user of AI agents consumes about as much electricity in a year as a clothes dryer – with a rising trend. Because utilities and grid operators are struggling to keep pace with the speed of data center plans, chip and cloud companies are increasingly taking stakes in power plants and power grids themselves, rather than waiting solely for external energy providers.
It remains to be seen how environmental authorities in Texas will handle the permit once the power plant begins operations in 2027 and actual emissions become verifiable. It will also be crucial whether Lancium meets its promised capacity growth to 19 gigawatts before the planned IPO in 2027 – and whether other chip companies will follow suit by investing directly in energy infrastructure.
